Sunday, October 30, 2005

A-conferencing

I set out on Thursday morning with the intention to document my trip to St. Louis and the conference there. I began with this photo of Conley House, which now houses the Campus Writing Program at MU.

We stopped there on the way out of town so that MT could pick up MP.

Sadly, my plan to photoblog the conference didn't really materialize. I have a few photos of people, but nothing at all of the lovely Saint Louis University campus and precious little that would suggest a conference going on.

Marcia, though, has a nice photo of Gail Hawisher, the keynote speaker, at her place. And a nice synopsis of Gail's talk, with shout-outs to a couple of fellow bloggers who were either present or hailed during the talk.

In addition to the keynote, a highlight for me was MNP's talk, based on the dissertation that she just defended one month ago. (The defense took place at SIU; I participated via speakerphone.) Her topic (for the talk and the diss) was social class and issues of technological access and the degree to which nontraditional students tend to assign agency to computers rather than to understand computers to be a medium for use. In other words, access isn't always about availability of technology: it's also about the affective relationship to technology. (I think I inserted the part about affect, but it's more or less what M was getting at, really.)

3 comments:

I felt bad about just posting a summary, but no time right now to do more. The links to the syllabus add a little bit of value for those who couldn't be there, so they can see an example of what we saw, but I had to mostly just settle for getting the summary up. But, hey, John dropped by to comment on the post and adjust the quote I attributed to him.

MNP defended her diss?!!? That's great! Do you know if she's had any of the chapters published anywhere or if she plans to? I would love to read something of hers. That is really great. If you speak w/ her any time soon, pass along my congratulations. Do you have any details about job search stuff??

Hey Donna,I was reading through your blog to find some material for a discussion on teaching non-fiction (for my English ed students). Thanks for the kind words--it's great to hear this kind of feedback :)MNP